Solar Power Bike with Video

Posted on: August 28th, 2008 2 Comments

So at lunch today I had yet another craving for chinese. I had gone to grand sichuan yesterday and thought I would just call and pickup. I tried to call, but their phone number was asking for a pin and was having some service issue (strange, yea I know).

Anyway, so on my walk from work to grand sichuan, I saw a purple biked mounted to a pole, see below.

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I didn’t find this odd and almost walked right by it without even noticing, but I saw some solar panels attached. I took some quick pictures.

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I also noticed a Yahoo logo on the bike. I am not sure if this is some Yahoo experincement or photo of lunch crowd on Varick or what.

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You can see their are 3 small size solar panels on what looked like a locked container. Their was a small wire running from this container to the front of the bike to what looked like a video camera mount.

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Although all of this was sealed shut, it got me thinking about ideas and what it could be and/or what you could do with something like this. So with that I wanted to post up some idea as well as possible projects for you Makezine lovers.

  • Solar Power recording system. Basic Nokia n95 streaming via Qik that is being charged by battery/solar panels (the container box)
  • Embedded honeypot project. This could be a simple video camera taking pictures and streaming it to a website with GPS (Maps) showing the location of the bike, in hopes that a theif steals the bike and you can track down the bike with the thief.
  • Bike Recording System – create video (or stream video) of you biking in NYC

What do you think about this bike, guerilla marketing from Yahoo, next big thing?

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2 Responses

  1. Mary says:

    How it works? on battery backup?

  2. John says:

    I think their is a battery in the solar box. I just got another email from a friend who sent me this link (http://www.flickr.com/photos/superamit/sets/72157607169368544/) to explain it.

    I think this must be a PR thing or something.

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